What makes us laugh or at least inspires a mute, inward chuckle is as indelible as the tyrannical randomness of our genetic array. I can’t convince you Laurel and Hardy were comedic geniuses if you are otherwise inclined, nor can anyone give me a good reason even to smile at the collected works of Bob Hope, Red Skelton and Lucille Ball (my parents' favorites – so much for genetics). In Nikolai Gogol, one of the best and most eccentric monographs ever written about a writer, Vladimir Nabokov says:
“The clown who appears in a spangled suit never seems as funny to me as the one who comes in wearing an undertaker’s striped pants and a dickey.”
Now that’s funny, because “dickey” is a funny word, article of clothing and man’s name. The point is, deadpan, Keaton-style humor, or humor of the grim, black Irish persuasion, on the margins of suffering and desolation, is the likeliest to make me laugh. Nabokov is making a bigger point both about Gogol and literature. He dismisses Gogol’s early work. Like Wordsworth, Tennyson,Whitman and Twain, Gogol was a dismayingly uneven writer, capable of grinding out wretched stuff, especially in his apprentice years. Here’s Nabokov’s entire passage:
“Coleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations, and local color is not a fast color. I have never been able to see eye to eye with people who enjoyed books merely because they were in dialect, or moved in the exotic atmosphere of remote places. The clown who appears in a spangled suit never seems as funny to me as the one who comes in wearing an undertaker’s striped pants and a dickey. There is nothing more dull and sickening to my taste than romantic folklore or rollicking yarns about lumberjacks or Yorkshiremen or French villagers or Ukrainian good companions. It is for this reason\ that the two volumes of the Evenings [on a Farm near Dikanka] as well as the two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod (containing Viy, Taras Bulba, Old World Landowners, etc.) which followed in 1835, leave me completely indifferent. It was however this kind of stuff, the juvenilia of the false humorist Gogol, that teachers in Russian schools crammed down a fellow’s throat. The real Gogol dimly transpires in the patchy Arabesques (containing Nevsky Avenue, The Memoirs of a Madman and The Portrait); then bursts into full life with The Government Inspector, The Overcoat and Dead Souls.”
Think of all the writers piously touted by critics, academics and credulous readers who are nothing more than “false humorists.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I appreciate Nabokov's point but disagree somewhat. Taras Bulba is indeed dull, but "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" (also of the Mirgorod cycle) ranks with Gogol's best. "Old-World Landowners" is better than Nabokov makes it out to be, and Dead Souls not quite so great (by a hair).
To me, Gogol reaches his peak with the "Two Ivans" and the Petersburg tales, then levels off, more or less, with Dead Souls. After that, it's swift and strange descent.
I consider Nabokov's Gogol one of the most insightful works on the author, and forgive but do not condone his attitude of superior insight. He is right in pointing out that Gogol's worst work has been forced upon the public; but he may not have the ultimate say on Gogol's best.
Post a Comment